Welcome to Psyche Game Jam 2024!

This is a game jam that runs from April to May in honor of Mental Health Awareness month. Our goal is to promote the production of narrative-based games with mental health themes, topics, and/or experiences. Whether you use this jam to create a new game from scratch, get a demo of a bigger project out, or release a game already in-development is entirely up to you!

To account for the wellbeing of participants, we designed this jam to be both relaxed and fun for those involved. Hence, submissions being open for two months rather than just May! With this, we hope most entries will be submitted right in time for the end of Mental Health Awareness month. The entries of this jam won’t be judged, as we believe the most important component here is creating more positive mental health representation.

• The narrative of the entry must include mental health themes, topics, and/or experiences.
• Using medical labels is optional, but be careful as to not mislabel experiences.
• Please provide content warnings and/or trigger warnings where applicable.
• Do not include misinformation, stereotypes, or stigmatizing depictions of mental health.
• NSFW games are allowed, but they need to be labeled as such. Submissions sexualizing minors are strictly prohibited. The only exception to this is alluding to specific experiences such as sexual assault.
• You are allowed to work by yourself or with a team of any size.
• There are no limitations on what game engine you use.
• If you don’t have the time to finish your game, it is acceptable to submit it as a demo.
• Games that were already in development prior to the game jam are welcome, so long as the game hasn’t already been released outside this jam and adheres to the jam’s rules. If you are planning to develop a rerelease or revamp of an existing game, the newer version must have significant enough changes from the original to qualify.
• You must have permission to use all assets included in your entry.
• You must also credit all contributions used in your entry - including public assets, where stated.
• Unethically-sourced or dubiously-sourced AI-generated content is prohibited from use. This pertains to AI models such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and similar. AI-generated assets are only permitted if the participant owns the rights to all of the training data.
• Games promoting hatred towards marginalized groups, including people with disabilities, racial minorities, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and gender minorities, are strictly prohibited.
• Harmony Frontiers has the right to remove any entries that are found to violate these guidelines.
• By participating in this game jam, you agree to the possibility of Harmony Frontiers promoting your entry to the public.
• Harmony Frontiers does not claim the property of any submitted entries. All participants maintain the rights to their work.

Looking to connect with other game developers? Whether it be for finding teams, general advice, or simply a sense of community, we have a few recommendations for you!

• The Harmony Frontiers Discord server has a whole category of channels available for Psyche Game Jam participants. This includes chatrooms intended for sharing entries, team recruitment, idea bouncing, and more!
• You can create and reply to topics on the Community tab of this jam page. We only ask that conversations started here are appropriate and jam-relevant!
• DevTalk is a wonderful Discord server targeted towards visual novel game developers but open to all. While we are not affiliated with them, their community is always happy to help and we highly recommend checking out their resources.
• Lemmasoft is an online forum for the development of visual novels and story-based games. You can browse threads freely without an account, but to add posts of your own, you’ll have to join the Ren'py Discord server for their latest registration password.

We wish you all the best of luck and look forward to seeing what you create!

Logo by YuukiPudding

Promo Art by Crowlee